5.8CRMar 31
Cooperative Local Differential Privacy: Securing Time Series Data in Distributed EnvironmentsBikash Chandra Singh, Md Jakir Hossain, Rafael Diaz et al.
The rapid growth of smart devices such as phones, wearables, IoT sensors, and connected vehicles has led to an explosion of continuous time series data that offers valuable insights in healthcare, transportation, and more. However, this surge raises significant privacy concerns, as sensitive patterns can reveal personal details. While traditional differential privacy (DP) relies on trusted servers, local differential privacy (LDP) enables users to perturb their own data. However, traditional LDP methods perturb time series data by adding user-specific noise but exhibit vulnerabilities. For instance, noise applied within fixed time windows can be canceled during aggregation (e.g., averaging), enabling adversaries to infer individual statistics over time, thereby eroding privacy guarantees. To address these issues, we introduce a Cooperative Local Differential Privacy (CLDP) mechanism that enhances privacy by distributing noise vectors across multiple users. In our approach, noise is collaboratively generated and assigned so that when all users' perturbed data is aggregated, the noise cancels out preserving overall statistical properties while protecting individual privacy. This cooperative strategy not only counters vulnerabilities inherent in time-window-based methods but also scales effectively for large, real-time datasets, striking a better balance between data utility and privacy in multiuser environments.
15.6AIDec 25, 2025
Towards Responsible and Explainable AI Agents with Consensus-Driven ReasoningEranga Bandara, Tharaka Hewa, Ross Gore et al.
Agentic AI represents a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks through the coordination of Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs), tools, and external services. While these systems enable powerful new capabilities, increasing autonomy introduces critical challenges related to explainability, accountability, robustness, and governance, especially when agent outputs influence downstream actions or decisions. Existing agentic AI implementations often emphasize functionality and scalability, yet provide limited mechanisms for understanding decision rationale or enforcing responsibility across agent interactions. This paper presents a Responsible(RAI) and Explainable(XAI) AI Agent Architecture for production-grade agentic workflows based on multi-model consensus and reasoning-layer governance. In the proposed design, a consortium of heterogeneous LLM and VLM agents independently generates candidate outputs from a shared input context, explicitly exposing uncertainty, disagreement, and alternative interpretations. A dedicated reasoning agent then performs structured consolidation across these outputs, enforcing safety and policy constraints, mitigating hallucinations and bias, and producing auditable, evidence-backed decisions. Explainability is achieved through explicit cross-model comparison and preserved intermediate outputs, while responsibility is enforced through centralized reasoning-layer control and agent-level constraints. We evaluate the architecture across multiple real-world agentic AI workflows, demonstrating that consensus-driven reasoning improves robustness, transparency, and operational trust across diverse application domains. This work provides practical guidance for designing agentic AI systems that are autonomous and scalable, yet responsible and explainable by construction.
9.6AIDec 4, 2025
ASTRIDE: A Security Threat Modeling Platform for Agentic-AI ApplicationsEranga Bandara, Amin Hass, Ross Gore et al.
AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.
13.1CVAug 17, 2025
Standardization of Neuromuscular Reflex Analysis -- Role of Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Model Consortium and OpenAI gpt-oss Reasoning LLM Enabled Decision Support SystemEranga Bandara, Ross Gore, Sachin Shetty et al.
Accurate assessment of neuromuscular reflexes, such as the H-reflex, plays a critical role in sports science, rehabilitation, and clinical neurology. Traditional analysis of H-reflex EMG waveforms is subject to variability and interpretation bias among clinicians and researchers, limiting reliability and standardization. To address these challenges, we propose a Fine-Tuned Vision-Language Model (VLM) Consortium and a reasoning Large-Language Model (LLM)-enabled Decision Support System for automated H-reflex waveform interpretation and diagnosis. Our approach leverages multiple VLMs, each fine-tuned on curated datasets of H-reflex EMG waveform images annotated with clinical observations, recovery timelines, and athlete metadata. These models are capable of extracting key electrophysiological features and predicting neuromuscular states, including fatigue, injury, and recovery, directly from EMG images and contextual metadata. Diagnostic outputs from the VLM consortium are aggregated using a consensus-based method and refined by a specialized reasoning LLM, which ensures robust, transparent, and explainable decision support for clinicians and sports scientists. The end-to-end platform orchestrates seamless communication between the VLM ensemble and the reasoning LLM, integrating prompt engineering strategies and automated reasoning workflows using LLM Agents. Experimental results demonstrate that this hybrid system delivers highly accurate, consistent, and interpretable H-reflex assessments, significantly advancing the automation and standardization of neuromuscular diagnostics. To our knowledge, this work represents the first integration of a fine-tuned VLM consortium with a reasoning LLM for image-based H-reflex analysis, laying the foundation for next-generation AI-assisted neuromuscular assessment and athlete monitoring platforms.